Like many across the nation, I watched Christine Blasey Ford’s Senate testimony at work on Thursday, streaming C-SPAN on my phone during my office hours. I found Ford’s calm, quiet voice to be devastatingly powerful and entirely believable. Like many women, I resonated deeply with the obvious terror and trauma she felt at being pinned down, groped, and muffled when she was a teen at a party.

I had classes to teach during Brett Kavanaugh’s corresponding testimony, but I watched clips from it later, and I was horrified by his partisan rancor and angry defensiveness. Nobody can blame Kavanaugh for being angry at the humiliation he and his family have faced in the media, but Ford has been subjected to the same treatment, and she didn’t rant or rage. A confirmation hearing is a glorified job interview, and given the serious issues the Supreme Court decides, I had no patience for Kavanaugh’s angry tantrums and disrespectful demeanor, especially toward Senator Amy Klobuchar. Regardless of whether Ford’s accusations are true, Kavanaugh’s true temperament was on display on Thursday, and his performance didn’t convince me he’d be a calm, measured, or impartial justice.

The full impact of both Ford’s and Kavanaugh’s testimony didn’t hit me until afterward. When I woke on Friday morning, I felt the same oscillation between sadness and rage I’d felt the day after the 2016 election. Although I’ve never experienced an assault as violent or traumatic as Ford’s, like most women I have my own history of uninvited encounters: groping and self-stimulating creeps on the T, a massage therapist who insisted on kneading my thighs and backside even after I repeatedly directed him toward my stiff neck and shoulders, and countless staring strangers and cat-callers.

To be a woman means being constantly on guard, something so ingrained it’s easy to forget that men don’t have the same worries. Without thinking twice, I check the backseat every time I get into my car; in parking garages, I quietly weigh the dangers of getting trapped in an elevator versus getting cornered in a stairwell. When I hike, I realize that if I were to be mugged or raped, I would also be blamed for that attack: what was I thinking when I ventured into the woods, even with a dog? On a daily basis, I envy men for the simple luxury of being able to walk outside after dark, and I wonder what it’s like not to see every lone stranger as a possible predator.

Years ago when my then-husband and I lived near a state forest with brown bears, we bought a shotgun for home defense. The first time I fired it, I was overwhelmed by its deafening sound and earth-shaking recoil. Never in my life had I, a petite woman, made such a strong and loud impact. “So this is what it’s like to have a penis,” I thought, immediately realizing that if I walked through the world with a weapon on my hip, nobody would mess with me. At that moment, I understood I’d been conditioned my entire life to see myself as prey: a small, vulnerable creature, ever on the defensive.

On Thursday, Christine Blasey Ford found something more powerful and earth-shaking than a shotgun: the power of a courageous voice. From where I sat, Ford’s calm and sometimes quavering words were more powerful than all of Brett Kavanaugh’s shouted rancor. I have no doubt the Republicans will confirm Kavanaugh, regardless of what a weeklong FBI investigation finds: patriarchy always defends its own, and the party of Trump has become the party of angry and aggrieved white men. But in the aftermath of Ford’s testimony, countless women like me will continue to do what we’ve always done, gestating our rage into resilience and simmering our sadness into a hidden elixir of resolve.

Writers, like children, are not dissuaded by the uselessness of hoarded ordinaries; instead, we cultivate a collector's sense, trying to capture mundane moments on a string of words.
--Lorianne DiSabato